Vehicular infotainment and telematics modules, such as software modules and hardware components, may often benefit from data pulled from the cloud or a remote source such as the Internet. This real-time data can enable advanced driver assistance, can improve the driving experience, and can generally facilitate advanced computing features in a vehicle. Presently, this may present some difficulty, for while an embedded vehicular modem may provide connectivity, the commands and data structures that can be sent and received remotely may need to be very well defined in advance on both the modem and a module that is receiving remote data. Accordingly, if a new feature is added to vehicle software or hardware that may benefit from remote data, a modem software update may be required in order to handle the new requests, which can create a frustrating situation for a vehicle driver.
In one example, a communication services network is described that enables client communication devices to synchronously or asynchronously communicate with one another or with legacy communication devices through a gateway in either (i) a real-time mode or (ii) a time-shifted mode and (iii) to seamlessly transition between the two modes. As the media of a message is either created or retrieved from memory, the sending client device progressively transmits the media over the network. The network progressively routes the media as it is transmitted to the recipient client device or gateway, which progressively stores the media as it is received. With progressive storage, the recipient has the option of rendering the media as it is received in the real-time mode, rendering the media out of storage in the time-shifted mode, or seamlessly transitioning between the two modes. In addition, users may communicate with each other “live”, similar to a conventional full duplex telephone call, when messages are synchronously transmitted and rendered in real-time with respect to one another. Alternatively, users may communicate with each other asynchronously by sending messages back and forth at discrete times, or by time-shifting the review of received messages.
In another current implementation, a computer implemented method is provided for monitoring and controlling a plurality of internet protocol (IP) enabled devices on a network. Each of the plurality of IP enabled devices has an internal IP address on the network, but does not have an external IP address for use on the Internet. The method includes the step of performing a port scan to obtain internal IP addresses for the plurality of IP enabled devices on the network. An HTML page is retrieved from each of the plurality of IP enabled devices on the network using the internal IP addresses. A data file name is extracted from each of the retrieved HTML pages and in some embodiments is translated to a new data file name. The method also includes retrieving data from each of the plurality if IP enabled devices on the network as a function of the extracted data file names or using the new data file names. Computer readable storage medium and gateway computing devices, for example in the form of a plug computer, are also disclosed.